There was an unexpected, to Lucius, boon to his chasing after the other desert tribes. While he had to contend with poorer forage, along a path already decimated by camels and picked clean by thralls, there was something he didn’t have to deal with.

Reports from Raymi’s expedition to the ley mine had treated the stories as apocryphal, both impossible to have occurred and impossible to confirm. The very notion of a sand demon that could summon storms and lead men in circles before devouring them seemed to be nothing more than the heat-induced derangements of scared men. As was already seen however, summoning sand storms was but one of many stigmata available to the tribesmen.

The confusion of direction was believed to be entirely natural. Of course some amount of northmen would be confounded by traveling without even the light of the sun to guide them, or the patterns of the stars for that matter. With no day or night, the passage of time became muddy, and with it the perception of speed. This was the primary reason no serious attempt to conquer the sunless desert had ever been made, despite the firm knowledge of earthly resources to be plundered.

Raymi’s men were not navigating by dead reckoning however, nor by landmarks or any other rough estimate. They had pocket compasses, a design introduced by myself but miniaturized and perfected within the Vassish University. Specifically, they had a number of pocket compasses; magnetic needles fitted to in the same direction, roughly north by north east.(1) these should have worked, in fact they were believed to be fool-proof and more valuable than human lives for they indeed were the lifeline of travel.

By using this almost magical tool, they should have been able to conquer the desert, so any missing soldiers must have been killed by the locals or done in by some combination of dehydration, fatigue, and weather. Raymi never quite imagined that something in the desert could twist their needles.

That something was slain by the other tribes. Lucius came upon the carcass, nothing more. It made a bloody boneyard of carapace and pink bones. A deviant species of the ironhide dragons, this demon of the dunes had swollen to enormous size. Just approaching the magic-saturated corpse was enough to make the hair upon his body stand on end. Akin to an electric eel far to the north, the creature had survived so long it became a godling, and in doing so harnessed the power of lightning within its flesh. All compasses–had they any–would have pointed directly toward it and led the traveler to a grisly doom.

Indeed, many thralls met just such a doom and then became part of the feast as well. The human bones had just as many tooth marks as the inside of the godling’s carapace and no flesh anywhere remained but what rotted in the sand of blood and filth.

Sacerdote said, “This is bad. They are awakening their thralls. They will have more stigmata than us.”

“Quite the opposite,” Lucius said as he twisted part of the hide. It was laced with iron the way black laces white marble. Growth had betrayed the creature and slain it. By gorging on the flesh of men rather than rocks, it had replaced the sturdy, organic steel with a shell no better than keratin. There was iron enough to make armor from, if he wanted to burn off the useless ivory first and he of course did not have that much time.

Cleaning his hands with a fistful of sand, Lucius explained, “He might have a few dozen more stigmata users but does he have their loyalty? Are they going to remember their time as thralls kindly? Will they follow orders now that they approach their commander’s status? An untrustworthy friend is worse than an enemy.”

“Do not forget your promise,” the priest said, jerking upon the reins of his camel. The beast cantered away, dancing over uncertain sand and bones to bring him back to the head of the procession.

Lupa came walking down a sand slope, her hands behind her head. “What promise?” she asked.

“He wants to escape north afterward,” Lucius said, picking up one particular shard of carapace to see what kind of weapons had been used to slay the godling, but he could only guess what had punched square holes through the hardened hide.

“Is that so? I was wondering why he didn’t stay behind at the library. He always fancied himself having extra affection from Anubi.”

“Doesn’t he?”

Lupa snorted. “He simply spent more time in the library than anyone else.”

“What about you?” Lucius asked, gesturing for her to follow him back to the start of the carnage. “You don't mind leaving your god behind?”

She crossed her arms and frowned. “Did you know there’s a fiction section to that library?”

They had been walking back to the pack animals and Lucius nearly walked past his animal while trying to recall where a section of poetry, plays, or even complete novels could have been. “He doesn’t seem like someone who would collect stories.”

“Lord Anubi didn’t discriminate in what he collected. Rescued is more like it. He has filched from shipwrecks, explorers, caravans and exiles. Not to mention the ancient texts. I only vaguely recall some of those from before my uplifting. He collects even what he doesn’t read, so I grew up reading unknown mixes of history and fantasy about kingdoms that may or may not exist. Like, obviously Vassermark exists but where is Blikland?”

Lucius frowned and mounted his camel. As he drew his dromedary alongside Lupas, he offered her a hand and said, “Nowhere, I think.”(2)

“See my point? What is real, what has faded away, and what never existed at all? I want to know and I want to feel the sun on my skin. Warm days and cold nights. I want to huddle beside a dancing fire and be surrounded by real people.”

Lucius snorted. He waved his free hand at Golden and Sacerdote, gesturing for the rag tag army to be marched on. As horns bellowed, he said, “I’ll take you north, but I don’t think you’ll like it very much. Those very people you want to see are the problem. There are too many of them. Can I ask you something? How many people do you know by name?”

Lupa flicked up one finger after another until she said, “I’m not sure they’re all alive anymore, but I think fifteen?”

My pupil almost leaned out of his saddle as he quietly asked, “How many people do you think crewed the Blazen Arrow that took me here? The ship with all those oars.”

Lupa again went to her fingers, blushing as she realized something was very wrong. “H-how should I know?”

“Ninety, give or take a few. All with families… well, most with families. Their own hobbies and dreams and relations, their own appetite for wine and play and each with a different price to put a knife in your back. When I take you north, Lupa, I’m not going to keep you at my side like a thrall, but I would highly suggest staying with me.”

She pouted. “Like I am now?”

The two of them mounted a dune and he looked upon the wind-scarred tracks of the army they pursued. “Just like this,” he said, and took the lead as the great ley mine appeared upon the horizon in so many jagged spires of stone.

The land around the mine was something of a shallow crater. If the dunes had been smoothed to a polish, it might have focused the diffuse light of the desert and burned a new sun into existence far above. Alas, sand might be melted to glass but it is the metal backing that makes a mirror. Lucius’ vantage point was not above some cosmic weapon, but merely of a grand slope down to the distant war camp of his tribal enemies. Even with his healthy sight, he could see nothing more than dark smudges in the haze some distance before the lip of the mine chasm. No plumes of sand spoke of their movement and no noise carried across to him, so he could only conclude, “They’re preparing something.”

Lupa shaded her eyes and squinted. “That’s three days ride still, if we go straight.”

“Priest!” Lucius bellowed, sending his mount scampering across the sand. “How much water do we have?”

“Two days,” Sacerdote answered.

Golden sat up from a pot laden cart, sticking his head above the railing so he could say, “Isn’t it weird you people measure by days when there is no night?”

The priest launched into an explanation about the grand water clock, but Lucius cut him off. “Hey, Compass, where’s the nearest waterfall?”

The former angel pointed a lazy finger forward. “Dead ahead.” The cracks that spill water into the world are many, but not that many.

Lucius nodded. “Stop us when we need to wait. We’ll fill up and engage three days from now. Finally, this is what I’ve been waiting for.”

“A march?” Lupa asked as the two of them headed back to the front.

“Action!”

“In three days.”

“Maybe sooner, they might turn around to engage us, but that would be their mistake. I’ll crush them in open ground.”

Lupa stared at him, incredulity growing. “Oh my gosh you actually are like a child playing a game.”

Lucius balked. “How do you even know what a child looks like? I thought you were awoken as an adult.”

She laughed. “Even the mindless have children and children always play. You’re actually scaring me somewhat. I guess for someone who can’t die, war is a game.”

“Of course it is. You have winners and losers, plays and counter plays. I just have advantages, the least of which is that I don’t die. I especially don’t want to hear it from the woman who captured me.”

She snapped her teeth at him and laughed. Then their march to his first open battlefield began.

The world is destined to have quite a navigational struggle between maps and compasses. While it seems like it should be trivial to make maps work well with compases, only in Aillesterra do they point to the nominal north. By convention, the cardinal directions are defined by the passage of the sun across the middle of the world. This makes for a perfectly usable coordinate system to locate any landmark. However, a compass does not care in the least about the sun. It points to the mountain home of the dragon lord, deep in Drachenreach. Because they point toward a specific location, you must first known your starting location to interpret the angle correctly. With the aid of the sun, one might re-derive their location but this is of course not possible in the desert. Blikland is an antiquated region of Skaldheim originally known for its tin mine. The resource dried up half a millenia ago and the name has slowly been forgotten.